GOP Candidate Said Abortion Bans Are the Same Thing as Hunting Regulations
Dave Reichert, the GOP nominee for governor in Washington, also said he "doesn’t" support abortion bans, he just supports "providing women with abortion options up to 20 weeks.”
Photo: reichertforgovernor.com AbortionPolitics 2024 Election
Since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, Washington has remained one state that hasn’t enacted a total or near-total abortion ban—but that doesn’t mean Dobbs didn’t have an impact. A study from May showed out-of-state abortion patients have increased by 50% since 2022, stretching an already strained health system thinner.
This has all come to a head in the state’s gubernatorial race, which is more competitive than you’d expect. On one side we have Democrat Bob Ferguson, the current state attorney general who, in 2023, led other state attorneys general to challenge a federal court ruling that nearly decimated access to medication abortion. And on the other, we have Republican Dave Reichert, a former Congressman from 2005 to 2019 who voted in line with Donald Trump about 93% of the time. Polling from the last couple of months puts Ferguson between four and 16 points ahead of Reichert.
This week, Reichert escalated his denial that he doesn’t support an abortion ban, as well as his claim that he’s never supported one—despite voting three separate times for a 20-week national ban in Congress in 2013, 2015, and 2017. (To be clear, a 20-week ban carries disparate harm for people with especially desperate circumstances, from medical emergencies to severe delays in access to care.)
Like JD Vance lying at the vice presidential debate that he doesn’t support a national ban but a “minimum national standard,” Reichert put his own spin on things. “It is not fair to say that I voted for a ban three times in Congress. I did not vote for a ban on abortion,” he told local news station KIRO 7 on Thursday. He instead supports “providing women with abortion options up to 20 weeks,” as he puts it on his website. That… isn’t how this works! You can’t just support an abortion ban and claim it’s not a ban because you’re “providing women with options” up until so-and-so weeks.
In July, in a Ron DeSantis-esque move that’s proven just as ineffective, Reichert’s campaign sent a cease-and-desist letter to a local TV station for running one of Ferguson’s ads which points to Reichert’s votes for a national abortion ban. In the bizarre letter, Reichert says the ad contains false, damaging information because Reichert has publicly said, “As governor, I will not change Washington laws on this issue.” And, Reichert’s team wrote, national “regulations” on abortion at 20 weeks aren’t a “ban.” Even more odd, the letter seemingly compares the so-called “regulations” Reichert supports to… driver’s licenses and hunting laws: